2002-08-29 04:00:00 PDT Sacramento -- The Assembly easily approved a bill Thursday that gives California's politically powerful Indian tribes greater say over development on land they consider sacred -- both public and private -- that lies outside their reservations.

The bill pitted tribes against a long list of business groups that said the measure would give tribes the power to hold up or stop commercial and residential development.

Scaled back substantially from when it was first introduced, the bill, SB1828 by Senate leader John Burton, D-San Francisco, no longer gives tribes veto power over projects on lands they consider sacred but makes it far harder for development to be approved on such areas.

"We cleaned it up a lot," Burton said.

With less than 90 hours to go to act on hundreds of bills, Assembly members debated the measure for over an hour Thursday, eventually passing it by a wide bipartisan margin to the Senate, where it faces a final vote before being sent to Gov. Gray Davis.

Burton, a liberal, used conservative GOP Assemblyman Bill Leonard to carry the measure in the lower house.

Before Leonard presented the bill, he placed a photograph of a huge oak tree held sacred by the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians into the computers of the Assembly's 80 members.

Sempra Energy plans a power line the tribe opposes that would cross their land near the tree.

The Pechanga Band is one of the most politically active tribes in the state,

using the cash and clout from California's approval of Nevada-style casinos on Indian lands to help make their case in the Legislature.

Since January 2000, tribes have generously contributed to the election campaigns of state officials of all political stripes. Burton has received at least $485,000 from tribes. Davis, who has final say on the bill, has gotten more than $840,000.

Despite being watered down, the bill still would place some tall hurdles in front of projects touching lands tribes define as sacred sites.

It creates a process to identify and catalog sites and requires local governments to protect them when a development is proposed.

Although a local government can overrule a tribe's objection to a project that affects a sacred site, the only way to do so is to prove that all feasible mitigation of damage to the site has been taken and there are overriding environmental, public health or safety reasons to build.

"This bill takes the environmental quality act into an entirely different realm that I think will prove intensely problematic," said Assemblyman Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, who voted against the bill.

Other opponents say the bill does not have a tight enough description of sacred sites and could allow Indians to influence land-use decisions throughout much of the state.

Saying he supports historic preservation, Assemblyman John Campbell, R- Irvine, noted: "We don't save every place that George Washington slept or walked. Not every Civil War battlefield has been saved as a historic monument."

Campbell said if the bill were applied to the Judeo-Christian tradition, "we would have to preserve every site where anyone ever prayed."

But supporters, like Leonard, said that tribes had received short shrift from the state -- dating back to 1850 -- and that giving them greater control over lands they consider culturally important was simple fairness.

"It's real hard to protect your land claims, it's real hard to protect your religion if you're persecuted to the brink of extinction," Leonard said, after recounting a brief history of treatment of Native Americans.

The genesis of the bill is a dispute between the Quechan tribe and Glamis Gold Ltd., which already has spent $14.7 million to try to build an open pit gold mine on the federal land 20 miles from the tribe's reservation in the Imperial Valley.

Opponents said the bill's attempt to thwart the project was too broad and would block all open pit mining in the state.

Leonard said that the parts of the sacred sites bill affecting open pit mining would be eliminated and that another bill would be narrowly written just to block the Glamis gold mine.